


What Dreams May Come

by wheatear



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Hallucinations, Mind Control, Spoilers for FFVII Original Game, post-Midgar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:00:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24359230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheatear/pseuds/wheatear
Summary: They’re nightmares, he tells himself. Sephiroth can’t control him.
Relationships: Sephiroth & Cloud Strife, Tifa Lockhart & Cloud Strife
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	What Dreams May Come

**Author's Note:**

> After playing the remake, I really wanted to write something with Cloud/Tifa. I wrote this instead.

She fights back. The problem is that she isn’t fighting to win. She doesn’t understand – there’s hurt and confusion in her eyes.

“Stop it! What are you doing?”

He doesn’t want to hurt her either, but he does. He hits her with the flat of his blade, parries her half-hearted punches and wears her down until she’s bruised, bleeding and crying out for help.

“Cloud, I don’t want to hurt you–”

“Shut up!”

Does she have any idea how much this is killing him? Does she know this isn’t him?

A gloved hand settles on his shoulder. Cold leather.

“Very good, Cloud.”

That silken voice wraps its tendrils around him and he stands, frozen. The smell of Mako is strong: fumes from the reactor. Sephiroth’s boots thud solidly on the metal walkway. He stands over Tifa and points his sword at her throat.

“No,” Cloud gasps. He barely gets the word out. It’s hard to think.

“Perhaps you ought to see the consequences of your failure,” Sephiroth says.

The tip of his blade glides over her clavicle and then down her sternum, slicing through fabric like the snap of a taut string. The flesh beneath is marked, as he had known it would be, by a long, thin scar, a diagonal slash across her chest. Tears well up in Tifa’s eyes. She can’t move without the sword piercing her skin.

A memory transfixes him: the whistling of a blade in the air, the sickening sound as it makes contact with flesh, the way Tifa’s body falls like a ragdoll down the steps of the reactor and collapses in a crumpled heap. He’d thought he’d lost her then.

“How did Tifa make it out?” Sephiroth ponders. “It wasn’t down to you. You broke your promise. You left her for dead.”

“No…”

“No? Why don’t you ask her?”

*

She’s in a glass tube, like those in Hojo’s lab. They’re mere inches apart: he presses his hands against the glass but he can’t reach her and he can’t hear her. She’s saying something – calling for help, beating her fists against the other side of the glass while the tube slowly fills with bright green Mako.

“I’ll save you!” he cries. “I’ll save you!”

But there are hands at his shoulders, arms, back, dragging him away – there’s a Mako tank of his own waiting for him and his vision glitches and fractures and he shrieks until his throat is raw, the wild howls of a trapped animal.

Mako.

It stings his skin, splinters the glass. He drowns in it, again and again and–

*

“Are you okay?”

He wakes up in a cold sweat. Tifa gazes at him, eyes warm and concerned. She’s okay. It wasn’t real. She’ll never know what he was dreaming about, will never know how many times he has failed to protect her.

He gets up, reaching for his sword. They’re in a ramshackle house underneath Junon, a short respite while they figure out how to infiltrate the city above.

“Tifa… Back in Nibelheim. How did you get out in the end?”

“Hmm?”

“After Sephiroth cut you.”

“Oh.” She turns away, the sweep of her hair hiding her eyes. “It was a long time ago… I don’t remember.”

*

They’re standing in the ruins of the Temple of the Ancients when he feels it, like a tug at his spine.

“Cloud.”

He’s wide awake. Sephiroth is there. Descending from on high to land lightly in the rubble, he holds out a gloved hand. Cloud feels the tug again, stronger than ever. He’s felt it before – every time Sephiroth whispers in his ear, every time that cold touch brushes his shoulder or arm, in his Mako-fuelled dreams where the energy that flows through his muscles and moves his limbs isn’t his own–

“The Black Materia.”

Yes. The Black Materia. The orb in his palm throbs with a power he can’t begin to comprehend. It’s the reason they came to this temple. If they have the Black Materia, Sephiroth can’t have it. He can’t summon Meteor.

“Come, Cloud.”

That outstretched hand beckons him. His limbs move of their own accord.

“Cloud, what are you doing?”

It’s Aerith who steps in front of him, standing in his way. He doesn’t hesitate. He strikes her down. She’s thrown against a collapsed pillar with a shocked cry and Sephiroth laughs.

“That’s it, Cloud. Kneel.”

He falls to his knees, trembling, and holds out the Black Materia. Sephiroth smirks and for one moment as his hand closes around the materia, Cloud feels a sense of exultation so intense that he gasps. Then the materia is gone, Sephiroth is gone, and he’s left there with the broken shrapnel digging into his knees, dimly aware of the others rushing in to help – Tifa first, going straight to Aerith to help her up, Barret cursing up a storm, yelling at him for going off his rocker, what the hell did he do–

_What did I do?_

*

“I don’t know what happened,” says Tifa, “but Sephiroth has the Black Materia and Aerith is gone. She disappeared in the middle of the night.”

*

He thinks he’s getting closer to Aerith but in truth there’s a darker presence.

The Ancient city smells of the sea at night, though they’re far inland. He sits with his back up against the bed. Opposite him a pair of green eyes gleam in the darkness.

“We’ll look for her together.”

“No,” says Cloud. “I won’t let you.”

“You still don’t understand. You and I are never apart.”

Sephiroth is mirroring his pose: back against the bed, one limb outstretched, the other pulled up, a hand resting on his knee. He looks relaxed.

“How did you control me?”

This isn’t real either, he’s sure. He’s talking to a shadow, but not a figment of his imagination. Sephiroth is something more.

“Every puppet has strings,” Sephiroth replies. “Yours dance to the tune of your master – me.”

“I’m not a puppet.”

Sephiroth chuckles. He feels it in his own chest, somehow.

*

When he wakes up, it’s still dark. The shell-like structures of the Ancient buildings seem to catch every whisper and eddy of the wind. Unease prickles the back of his neck. She’s here. He’s sure of it.

But so is he.

Tifa stirs in the other bed nearby. “Cloud?”

“Tifa… Do you have a second?”

“Sure.”

She’s confused, but follows him outside. The silence is oppressive.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks.

“Bad dreams.”

She folds one hand over the other. “I get those too.”

“Sephiroth thinks he can control me again.”

She doesn’t ask how he knows this. “Can he?”

“I don’t know how he did it. That’s what scares me.”

He hates to admit this. He can’t look at Tifa as he does, turning away to pace around instead, but she’s the only one he can tell, the only one he trusts not to judge. There’s something inside him that he doesn’t understand, the part that gives him these nightmares, the part that made him hand over the Black Materia to Sephiroth.

She says nothing, and he goes on:

“Tifa, am I…” He takes a breath. “Am I me?”

“I don’t understand.”

That confusion in her eyes. He’s seen it before. He shakes his head.

“Am I the Cloud you remember? The one who made a promise to you.”

“I – yes, of course you are, but I don’t know what that has to do with…”

With Sephiroth? It’s okay, he thinks. She doesn’t know about the nightmares. She believes in him, and that’s what counts.

“Good,” he says. “I know it might seem weird, but that’s what I needed to hear.”

“Really? That helped?”

She sounds pleased and he’s grateful, so grateful, that she’s here.

“Yeah. I think as long as you’re here… I’ll be okay. And if I do go crazy again… kick my ass, will you?”

She smiles. “That’s a promise.”

*

Promises, he soon learns, are there to be broken.


End file.
